Online photo sharing sites provide consumers with a way to upload and store digital images for viewing and sharing with others over the Internet. The assignee of the present application has developed a peer-to-peer (P2P) based photo sharing site in which the computers of each member in the network become peer nodes that are capable of directly communicating with other peer nodes in the network so that consumers can share images with one another without going through a central server. In both types of photo sharing sites, users typically store uploaded images in online web photo albums that guests are invited to view, download, and order prints.
In contrast to photo sharing sites, a blog is a hosted service on a central site that allows consumers to publish or post personal journals called weblogs, or blogs for short, on the Web. A personal blog maintains dated text entries in chronological order and can take many forms, such as an online scrapbook for pasting links and quotes from items found on the Web; personal diaries, often illustrated with digital snapshots; and some are more like digital soapboxes, providing a platform for airing opinions and commentary. A user (known as a blogger) adds entries using a simple online form in their browser, where weblog publishing software on the central server takes care of formatting the page layout and other supporting functions.
A publishing standard known as MOVABLETYPE by SIX APART of San Francisco, Calif. is widely used for blogging. One service of the standard called TrackBack allows two blog entries to link bidirectionally. This allows a blogger to comment on another person's blog by creating one link on their own blog to the other person's blog, and by creating a second link on the other person's blog to the blogger's blog, creating a bidirectional link.
Although TrackBacks are a convenient service to bloggers, TrackBacks have several disadvantages. One is that blogs are hosted on a central site, meaning that one user or blogger, cannot directly access the blog of another user without going through the central site. Therefore, the track backs must be created through the central site. In addition, although blogs may contain some image data, a TrackBack is only capable of displaying a headline and perhaps the first paragraph of the blog being discussed so that when a user is visiting blog A, the user can read a text message regarding blog B and decide whether or not to click on a link to visit blog B.
In a peer-to-peer image file sharing system, people create albums about all kinds of common subjects, such as pets, children, sports, etc., and it would be desirable to create communities based around the themes of these albums by allowing users to create bidirectional links between albums. However, services such as TrackBack are used with central hosted blogs, but not with P2P networks, or in desktop hosted photo sharing applications. In addition, bidirectional link services such as TrackBacks are capable of only creating links that display text messages, and cannot be used to create a link between online albums, which include primarily thumbnail images, rather than text messages. Therefore, there is no existing mechanism in P2P photo sharing networks for a user viewing an album to discover other related albums except by manually performing keyword searches in online album metadata.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and system for allowing an online album owner to automatically establish a bidirectional link between another online album and the owner's album to thereby inform guest viewers of both albums of related albums.